Huh. I didn’t even know they allowed the Internet.
They do, but the people who actually get to use it are very strictly vetted and have far too much to lose than the average person on the street if they go against the regime.
In the other direction, there’s a livestream of what’s on their primary TV channel, which is still working, albeit a bit slowly. An awful lot of enthusiastic (?) mass marches, bought-in football matches, sweeping panoramas of nature and high-rise cities, but sometimes unintentionally revealing: once I caught a reverential news report of Kim apparently giving a suitably reverential worker the keys to a house on a visibly new residential development. Only, the house appeared to be as devoid of furniture as the whole area appeared to be of people, apart from the official party.
From time to time, I catch that on this site.
Someone recently smuggled a cell phone out of NK.
In addition to straight up documenting what you’re doing, they also replace words:
Popular South Korean words like “oppa,” which literally translates to big brother but has become South Korean slang for a boyfriend, are automatically replaced with the word “comrade.” Users also receive a warning; in this example, it said: “This word can only be used to describe your siblings.”
The Korean word for “South Korea” is also replaced with “puppet state.”
I like how the onebox from the Fortune cite includes the subhead
Including screenshotting users activities every five minutes.
As if that was some sort of intrusive outrage.
Of course it’s something many, many corporations do to their employees in the USA and nobody seems to think that’s an outrage that should be outlawed. In fact a goodly fraction of Fortune’s readers probably insist it’s a Good Thing when they do it to their wage slaves.
A screenshot every five minutes sounds to me like a lot of data to analyze. Do they only go through it when the Power that Be is already suspicious of someone for some other reason?
Are you talking about companies doing that on private phones for private messages? I think that’s a tad different.
From the article
According to a BBC report, the smartphone takes screenshots of the user’s actions every five minutes and saves them in a file the user can see but not open. Only the North Korean authorities can open the files, allowing them to review what users are looking at.
I’d guess they’re not being constantly analyzed (unless they’re using AI), but the fact that authorities can go and look through your history serves as intimidation.
I think the ramifications of your boss (in the USA) catching you saying something bad are considerably less dire than if the NK Government catches you badmouthing them. And if your employer is the US government, I’m not sure they’d be allowed to reprimand you for it.
Plus, your boss doesn’t, I hope, change your messages to reflect their propaganda.
Now I’m wondering where these North Korean phones come from. The North Korean market is small enough, and the PR implications bad enough, that I can’t imagine any of the major phone companies would want to be involved in this. Do they take standard phones, rootkit them to be able to install unapproved apps, and then delete the standard texting apps and replace them with state-created ones?
It looks like a normal, modern, smart phone, but I didn’t see any branding in this video:
I found a wiki page for Arirang smart phones that are used in NK, running a modified version of Android.
I’m not sure if that’s the same as the one recently smuggled out nor if they’re made in NK or China.
In the August of that same year [2013], first Arirang was released and was claimed to the first domestically produced smartphone though analysts say that “Arirang” is likely to be manufactured in China.[5]
Edit, this article, from 2014, says they’re made in China
The North Korean “internet” is basically a countrywide intranet that’s under government control. Very few North Koreans have access to the real internet and they tend to be either Kim family members & other super elites, spies, and state sponsored cyber criminals.